[2007-06-26] Brian Wilson 'Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall And Redemption Of Brian Wilson' paperback by Peter Ames Carlin

Linda · **Posted:** Fri Dec 26, 2008 6:12 pm

From Publishers Weekly
In this exhaustive tome, former People magazine writer Carlin chronicles the lives of the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson. By now the Wilson story is well-known, and Carlin doesn't stray much from the script: Wilson's abuse at the hands of his cantankerous father, Murry; his decline into depression; his drug use; and the band's slide from the top of the charts, singing about surfing and fast cars, to the depths of despair and, ultimately, Wilson's redemptive 2004 release of SMiLE. While the major beats of the story may not be news to fans, Carlin's comprehensive research adds an entirely welcome perspective. Based on numerous primary interviews, and parsing through hundreds of hours of unreleased studio tape, he succeeds in rendering an immediate and often heart-wrenching look at both the psychological abuse and the artistic muse that prodded Wilson to greatness and paralyzing depression. In one memorable passage drawn from the studio session tape, Carlin renders the torment endured by Wilson at the hands of his father during the recording of the hit "Help Me, Rhonda." It is moments like these, mixed in with Carlin's sober insights, that raise this effort a cut above the standard rock biography. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The near-miraculous appearance of Smile in 2004, 37 years after Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson abandoned that ambitious concept album, has opened the door for another biography of rock's most notoriously troubled genius. To a great extent, Wilson's life is the Beach Boys life. He dominated the band, writing and producing virtually all the hits of its early 1960s heyday, before drugs and mental problems sidelined him. Carlin perforce covers the Beach Boys' rise, fall, and subsequent resurrection as a nostalgia act, as well as their internecine feuds, keenly poignant because the key band members were brothers and cousins. Yet, having enjoyed the cooperation of his subject, he sensitively and compassionately focuses on Brian; and having heard hundreds of hours of unreleased recordings and interviewed many of Brian's collaborators and associates, including the surviving Beach Boys, he emphasizes the music. A Beach Boys fan before he was a senior writer at People (he's since moved on), Carlin proves the ideal person to pen a highly readable and substantive book on this particular rock legend. --Gordon Flagg, Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

Review
"The Beach Boys in Peter Arnes Carlin's Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of Brian Wilson (Rodale Press): Great evocations of a great musician and the pop group he built, via great prose: 'As in our fantasies of America, what matters about a person in a Beach Boys song has nothing to do with who he or she is, and everything to do with the strength of their ambition and the things he or she chooses to do with it. This same message plays out across all cultural and racial lines in 'Surfin USA,' and it's just as vivid in 'The Girls on the Beach,' where, as they repeat in the chorus, the young lovelies are 'all within reach.' That promise—extended in the warm, jazzy harmonies Brian cribbed from the Four Freshmen, who found them in the big band arrangements of Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington—had as much to do with social opportunity as sex.'" --Entertainment Weekly

"Fans will be picking up excitations aplenty from Catch a Wave, this absorbing treatment of Brian Wilson. The Beach Boys' auteur couldn't live with authority figures or without 'em—his abusive dad/manager, his hit-crazed brothers and cousins, or his controlling therapist. 'If he'd used his music to escape his father,' Peter Ames Carlin writes, success 'transformed everyone around him into a legion of Murrys... [all reiterating] his father's insults. Nobody wants to hear this crap! Dust yourself off and write another hit!' Ultimately, the exhumed SMiLE was a hit—almost 40 years later—though bandmate Mike Love would still rather get litigious than lavish praise on pop's patron saint of lost boys. Grade: A" --Entertainment Weekly

Product Description
Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, along with Mike Love and Al Jardine - better known as the Beach Boys, rocketed out of a working-class Los Angeles suburb in the early sixties, and their sun-and-surf sound captured the imagination of kids across the world. In a few short years, they rode the wave all the way to the top, standing with the Beatles as one of the world's biggest bands.Despite their utopian visions, infectious hooks, and stunning harmonies, the Beach Boys were beset by drug abuse, jealousy, and terrifying mental illness. In "Catch a Wave", Peter Ames Carlin pulls back the curtain on Brian Wilson, one of popular music's most revered luminaries, as well as its biggest mystery. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and never-before heard studio recordings, Carlin follows the Beach Boys from their earliest days through Brian's deepening emotional problems to his triumphant re-emergence with the release of SMiLE, the legendarily unreleased album he had originally shelved.

About The Author
PETER AMES CARLIN's award-winning reportage on Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys has appeared in the New York Times, People, American Heritage, and the Portland Oregonian, where he is currently the newspaper's television critic. Previously he was a senior writer for People in New York.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594867496/?tag=imwan-20

[2007-06-26] Brian Wilson 'Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall And Redemption Of Brian Wilson' paperback by Peter Ames Carlin

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